I can't see how on some of the tight bendy lanes around us with no suitable passing places that it would be possible to sense an oncoming vehicle.

Because the vehicles will be able to broadcast their positions to each other.

Humans only know there's a vehicle coming when they can see it, machines have no such restriction.

The problem with autonomous vehicles is interfacing with humans.
Once you remove humans from vehicles altogether they will become far more efficient.

The linked story is a case in point, the bike was struck because the human controlling the bike was unable to react in time to the machine's change of decision.
Had the bike been controlled by a machine the collision would not have happened because the machine can sense and react at a rate which humans are simply incapable of.
This enhanced decision rate is why ABS keeps a bike upright when doing a full emergency stop on greasy wet cobbles.

I have worked in robotics and automation for pretty much the whole of my career, believe me it is hard enough controlling things when they are on fixed locations and fixed paths, let alone freely wandering around. There is an awful lot of hype around at the moment because AV is a bandwagon no company wants to miss, they are all looking for investment so they are hardly gonna let on how hard its going to be. Humans do an awful lot of things better than machines (like decision making, not just routine fairly low tech decisions like ABS where it only has to stop wheel locking up) - truth is people go on about machines existing on their own and reproducing etc - they all need electricity to function, take that away and they are just so much junk. For vehicles to keep track of where they are they they need massive 3D files of the surroundings (which need constant updates), if one thing is out of place the car can see it as an obstacle, read a few weeks ago that an AV kept swerving when it went over a section of road, there was one pixel (1 pixel in millions) wrong on the picture it was seeing and it treated it as an obstacle to be avoided. How can you program an AV to cross a double white line (humans do it all the time to get round obstacles).

The atmosphere in traffic is going to be so congested with radio waves to allow the cars to 'talk to each other' that I would be surprised if anything gets the signal it needs.

If humans can be trusted to concentrate on what they are doing they are superb, trouble if some are easily distracted and that is when the problems start. There are more and more humans being put out of jobs by automation (mainly on a cost basis) but they still have to be paid welfare, and 'the devil finds work for idle hands'. it is pretty ironic that just when population is rising humans think it is a good time to try to destroy hundreds of millions of jobs around the world by replacing humans.

__________________
SV650 AL7

Fear knocked on the door, Hope answered and when he opened the door there was nobody there.
"Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do"- Mark Twain

Because the vehicles will be able to broadcast their positions to each other.

Humans only know there's a vehicle coming when they can see it, machines have no such restriction.

The problem with autonomous vehicles is interfacing with humans.
Once you remove humans from vehicles altogether they will become far more efficient.

The linked story is a case in point, the bike was struck because the human controlling the bike was unable to react in time to the machine's change of decision.
Had the bike been controlled by a machine the collision would not have happened because the machine can sense and react at a rate which humans are simply incapable of.
This enhanced decision rate is why ABS keeps a bike upright when doing a full emergency stop on greasy wet cobbles.

There are no fixed obstacles in the way of an aircraft for 99.9999% of its flight, it just has to maintain correct altitude (aircraft flying in different directions are separated by vertical space to stop collisions, not horizontal space) and a heading within a few miles each way, they can fly down a GPS / radio corridor to land.

A more equivalent comparison may be that after landing an aircraft can taxi to its position and dock ready for unloading without any pilot input. Also aircraft systems are maintained to military level of performance, I somehow doubt that the average AV will be.

IMHO driverless vehicles will be every terrorists dream come true, why risk your life driving a bomb to a location when a vehicle can drive itself, you can kidnap someone just by taking control of their car and diverting it to a place you choose - !S!S must be wetting themselves in anticipation.

Bit of a wandering thread, how did we get from Triumph Bobber sales to AV ?

__________________
SV650 AL7

Fear knocked on the door, Hope answered and when he opened the door there was nobody there.
"Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do"- Mark Twain

There are no fixed obstacles in the way of an aircraft for 99.9999% of its flight, it just has to maintain correct altitude (aircraft flying in different directions are separated by vertical space to stop collisions, not horizontal space) and a heading within a few miles each way, they can fly down a GPS / radio corridor to land.

A more equivalent comparison may be that after landing an aircraft can taxi to its position and dock ready for unloading without any pilot input. Also aircraft systems are maintained to military level of performance, I somehow doubt that the average AV will be.

IMHO driverless vehicles will be every terrorists dream come true, why risk your life driving a bomb to a location when a vehicle can drive itself, you can kidnap someone just by taking control of their car and diverting it to a place you choose - !S!S must be wetting themselves in anticipation.

Bit of a wandering thread, how did we get from Triumph Bobber sales to AV ?